Sylpheed sickness

[SteWo]

Hello!

Maybe s.o. can help me although it is most likely not an OpenBSD problem.

I use OpenBSD 4.3 as my desktop on a Lenovo T61. WM is fluxbox. For mails I use Sylpheed from the packages (version 2.1.7). With OpenBSD 4.2 I had Sylpheed-Claws (now Claws-Mail) but the following problem made me switch to Sylpheed hoping to live peacefully...

Until yesterday everthing was fine: "Get" fetched all new mail from the provider. Without any recognizable reason today Sylpheed fetches ALL MAILS AGAIN (>9000)!!! This ***** behaviour happend exactly with Claws before! And I have no clues why! Arrrgh:mad::mad::mad:

Neither manual, FAQ or Google gave any hint on whats going on here. I feel confident that the problem is not OpenBSD but rather Sylpheed or GTK. Does anybody have an idea what I can do???

Thank you!

SteWo
(helpless, clueless, desperate)

[18Googol2]

Until yesterday everthing was fine: "Get" fetched all new mail from the provider. Without any recognizable reason today Sylpheed fetches ALL MAILS AGAIN (>9000)!!! This ***** behaviour happend exactly with Claws before! And I have no clues why! Arrrgh:mad::mad::mad:


You reminds me of one of the most fav subject in uni.

This is what POP3 differs from IMAP. Sounds like the mail account was deleted and recreated yesterday

[SteWo]

Any idea where the flag "New account" is placed? Want should I check? Is this a problem with the provider or on Sylpheed's side?

SteWo

[SteWo]

Howdy!

Well - I still don't know WHY? sylpheed (and claws-mail as well) shows this strange behaviour. On the German counterpart to this forum (bsdforen.de) I found one fellow claws user who made the same experience.

After this last incident I had switched back to claws-mail, whch as a result fetched all those >9,000 mails (roughly 1.6G). So here I was with two comparable programs and no idea why both behaved strange every now in a while.

After some sleep and thinking I realized that both (sylpheed and claws-mail) use a folder ~/.sylpheed/uidl/<account-name> or ~/.claws-mail/uidl/<account-name> respecively, to store a list with the mail-ids and a system-id. This brought me to an idea: I took the claws-mail-ids and combined them with the sylpheed-system-id. Et voilá: Sylpheed now "knew" again of the already fetched mails and fetched only those missing!

My workaround will be to set up a little script to save the content of ../uidl/ on a regular schedule. If claws "forgets" his memory the next time I will be able to go back to a date in the near past.

I still hope that s.o. comes up with an explanation of what really went wrong but until then I will have to cope with this issue as described.

Cheers,
SteWo

[18Googol2]

AFAIK, it is feature, not a bug. No, Im not kidding at all. This is how POP3 protocol works and you cant do anything but accept it.

[SteWo]

Can you pls. give some background on this 'feature'? I find it hard to believe that the developers of sylpheed / claws are forced to implement a routine to drop it's entire database-index at random times. If this is to be a 'feature' - why aren't the mails deleted as well? I never noticed in the documentation a limit of ... say 10,000 mails or xGB volume which would be a strange reason but at least an explanation.

Beside that I never noticed similar complaints by users of other mail-clients, e.g. mutt, thunderbird, evolution to name just a few.

Hope you can enlight my day.

SteWo